A wide variety of means exist for communication between users. For example, a user may conduct phone calls via a home phone, work phone, and mobile phone. In addition, users may also communicate using devices such as PC's, PDA's, pagers, etc. using manners of communicating as email and instant messaging.
Unfortunately, managing such a wide variety of communication means can be difficult. In particular, as a user changes location, communication with the user may vary. For example, while on travel, it may only be possible to reach a user by mobile phone. However, the user may best be reached by email while at work. Also, the user may wish to implement various rules for receiving and controlling communications. For example, to be reached at home, the user may want the home phone to ring three times before forwarding the call to a mobile phone. As another example, the user may wish to be paged each time an email is received from a particular person while away from the office.
Typically, to implement communication management, a person must individually manage each communication device separately. Thus, when the user wishes to change how communication is managed, the user may have to deal with numerous devices and, perhaps, service centers.
For example, previous notification systems, such as a pager notification from a voice mail server, require a calling party attempting to contact a user to send a message to a specific pager device. However, if the calling party instead dials the user's home phone number, the calling party might leave a voice mail on a voice mail system for a device currently inaccessible to the user. As a result, the user would not receive the voice mail until a later time.
To keep apprised of communications, the user may dial into a voice mail system using an available device to check for messages or missed calls for unavailable devices. For example, if the user is away from the home or office, the user may have a cell phone for calling a work or home voice mail system to check for messages and missed calls. However, such an approach requires the user to dial into these voice mail systems periodically to check for messages and missed calls. As a result, the user may learn of missed calls and messages after a significant passage of time. Alternatively, the user may spend time unnecessarily to check voice mail systems for nonexistent messages.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an adaptive method and apparatus for providing a user's preferred device with a notification of a call or a voice mail for a device other than the user's preferred device. Accordingly, the user may receive timely notifications of incoming calls and voice mail messages.